Thursday, May 17, 2012

John, the last time you were interviewed
at Forensic Focus you were the Vice Chairman and Chief Legal Officer at
Guidance Software. Now you're the founder and CEO of X1 Discovery - tell us about that move.

I am proud to have been a co-founder and part of the senior team at
Guidance Software for ten years. The early days at Guidance were
exciting as we sowed new fields, just as we are doing now at X1
Discovery. At Guidance, we first pioneered Windows-based forensics,
which was the new paradigm and represented an order of magnitude
improvement over Dos-based forensics. Then circa 2004, we introduced and
championed the concept of enterprise in-house eDiscovery, a strategy
that ended up being Guidance’s main force of growth leading to our IPO
in 2006.

So after leaving in 2009 and engaging in consulting
projects through 2010 I began discussions with X1, an Idealab Company
that I always thought had excellent search technology for both the
desktop and the enterprise. At first the intent was to sit on the board
as an investor but then I learned about the IP they were developing for
social media, and I also became excited about the promise of X1’s
enterprise server to be a very robust eDiscovery early case assessment
and first pass review solution. So to make a long story short, the board
at Idealab – which is our parent company -- offered to have me head up
X1 Discovery as a spin-off to X1 Technologies, with ownership of all our
intellectual property. It was a great opportunity and the Idealab board
has been very supportive and enabled me to recruit some outstanding
talent and assemble a great team.

What does X1 Discovery do? What makes it
different from the other eDiscovery companies which have entered the
market in the past few years?

At X1 Discovery we are pioneering the new fields of forensics and
eDiscovery of social media and cloud-based data. I have always been
interested in where the puck is going as opposed to where it is now, and
we believe the X1 Discovery’s disruptive technology is already years
ahead of the field. We accomplished this by leveraging our vision and
industry experience to effectively build on the patented X1 Search
Technology.

Tell us more about your products, X1 Social Discovery and X1 Rapid Discovery.

X1 Social Discovery, launched in October 2011, is basically like EnCase
or FTK for social media and website collection. It is a desktop
application specifically designed for computer investigators and legal
professionals that we believe is the clear market leader in its class.
X1 Social Discovery’s two core benefits are scalability and
defensibility. It can collect tens of thousands of social media items in
a few hours and up to millions in a few days, and then instantly search
and filter those items with the patented X1 fast-as-you-type indexed
search. X1 Social Discovery is very defensible as we are establishing a
chain of custody with case management, evidence segregation, logging,
and MD5 hashing of all collected items. Also, social media sites are
accessed read-only, which is important as visiting a live Facebook page
can easily cause changes to the page and its metadata. Finally, we
collect all available metadata on social media sites. A Facebook item
alone has over two dozen unique metadata fields and we preserve and
collect all of them.

Our other product, X1 Rapid Discovery is a proven, and now with the
release of version 4, a truly cloud-deployable, eDiscovery and
enterprise search solution that enables users to quickly identify,
search, and collect distributed data wherever it resides in the IaaS
cloud or within the enterprise. Just this past week we were the first
eDiscovery company accepted into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution
Provider program. Importantly, its a non-appliance software solution
that is very easy to install and configure. So in addition to the cloud,
X1 Rapid Discovery is quickly deployed in the field on the
investigator’s own hardware to collect data from servers and/or to
index, cull and search through up to terabytes of collected data...

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Can you tell us something about your background and why you decided to work in the field of applied trauma psychology?

I have had a very mixed career; I have worked in medical research, as a
retail operations director, property development, Head of a counselling
service and running my own company. I think that the fact that I have
had lots of experience doing different things has been really helpful to
me. Although I love research, at heart I am a practitioner and enjoy
working with people and organisations to help them to have happy and
healthy lives.

I don’t think that I set out to be an applied trauma psychologist – it
was just that the work was interesting and I could see that it helped
people deal with difficult issues.

Tell us more about applied trauma psychology - what does your work involve and who do you aim to help?

I work with lots of different organisations and kinds of people. My
main areas of expertise are in psychological trauma, bullying and
harassment and psychological rehabilitation. I have worked with victims
of major incidents such as 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings as well as natural
disasters, transport deaths, rapes and other crimes. My goal is to
help organisations prepare for crisis and disasters by training and
preparing their employees and when a crisis occurs to help the
organisation to deal with it to limit the damage caused to the
workforce. I have developed a number of psychological tools which help
people to recover from stress, burnout and psychological trauma.

What experience have you had working with digital forensics professionals?

The first time I worked with digital forensic professionals was around
ten years ago. A commercial forensics organisation had taken over some
work on Operation Ore and the young forensic examiners were having
problems in dealing with the impact of the images they were assessing. I
later became involved in supporting other forensic examiners who were
working in Eastern Europe where they felt that they were in very
threatening working environments with little support. More recently I
have become more involved with law enforcement officers working with
child abuse. This is a really interesting area of work and I find that
the people involved in this work are really dedicated and keen to push
the boundaries of their knowledge of computer forensics to the limits.

What are the short and long term effects
of working with the kind of disturbing material which digital forensics
examiners often encounter in their work?

I think that it is relatively easy to see that some people will never be
able to deal with the distressing images, sounds and dialogue that are
part of the examiners world. Some people fail within the first few days
of being exposed to the material. However, perhaps more difficult is
the slow grinding down of the digital examiner's resilience which can
happen over months or years. People who have handled this kind of work
may suddenly find that they are unable to deal with it any more. I
think that most people have a “shelf-life” for dealing with the most
distressing material and need to take a break. The initial reaction to
distressing material is the shock and disgust it causes, the fact that
people will do things that most of us could never imagine. This is
particularly distressing when the victim is a child. The real problems
relate to the trauma reactions that this shock can create. The way our
brains work is to try to protect us from anything that could cause harm.
The common response to a traumatic exposure is to a) try to avoid
further exposure b) become hyper alert or aroused to the material or
thoughts about the material and c) to have dreams, flashbacks or
constant thoughts about the exposure. People can also become irritable,
detached and start using “self-medication” (caffeine, alcohol, drugs –
prescribed and otherwise) to handle their symptoms. Often relationships
suffer as normal loving relationships are affected by the impact of the
material...